It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there actually,’ he says, pointing. ‘One blew over in a storm in ’99. But I was able to plant on both sides and create a vista. It’s getting there.’ He gestures across topiary and lawns and away towards the opposite hillside, where an avenue of trees and classical pillars sweeps up towards the skyline. Hang on: he created that too? It’s not unknown for famous conductors to act like Bourbon princes. Here in la France profonde, though — on the terrace of his 16th-century farmhouse, and celebrating 40 years as director of his early-music ensemble Les Arts Florissants — Christie is literally master of all he surveys.
Well, of course he is. This is the Vendée, a region of poplar-lined highways and dusty, shuttered villages that tourists tend to ignore, and even the road signs make it clear that ‘Les Jardins de William Christie’ are something of a big deal. Passing through the village of Thiré, where an entire quarter has been refurbished as a summer academy for Les Arts Florissants, you enter an enchanted domain of baroque order and very personal fantasy. And for a few days each summer, when Christie opens his garden to the public for a short music festival, it harbours fabulous beasts. Someone carries a theorbo across a gravel path and vanishes between perfectly trimmed hedges. A harpsichord snoozes beneath an Italian pine. For Christie, it’s all of a piece with the way he makes and teaches music.
‘This tree,’ — he waves at a gnarled-looking trunk — ‘it’s boxwood. It’s the only tree that was here when I arrived in 1985. Students who play boxwood instruments, which includes most baroque oboes and flutes, arrive here having never seen an actual boxwood tree.
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